I’m a social worker experiencing suicidal ideation..part 2.

Part 1 Revisited:

Last week I wrote about the lack of research being done understanding the experiences of social workers struggling with mental health needs or having suicidal ideation due the impact of their job or due to an exacerbation of existing mental health needs.  This week will look at the beginning of the social work career for many us and what was told to us in graduate school.  

The discussions in graduate school:

If you are like me, you attended some type of graduate or undergraduate program to learn skills in order to work successfully with people from a variety of communities, experiences, and cultures involved in a variety of systems.  We learn to be more culturally humble, understand the code of ethics, and observe different treatment modalities.  We are taught social worker theories, learn to be flexible and know we have much to learn about our profession.  Many of us participate in an internship, practicum, or volunteer experience in order to get better exposure to other communities or to narrow down our areas of interest through these in-vivo experiences in undergraduate or graduate school.  The social work program is a vigorous one that challenges us both cognitively and physically.  

One missing gap in this education is the very real discussion on the potential impact the profession has on our mental health.  Many of us join the profession for personal reasons such as trying to understand ourselves, our families or due to a positive impact from another social worker.  Sometimes it can be to be a better social worker than what we experienced as a child. 

When these get tested and challenged or even when the years go by and the accumulate impact of the field starts to show up in our bodies and minds, there has been little preparation in how to handle these experiences in an authentic and meaningful way. 

Self-Care or Mental Health Care?

Like many of you reading this blog, I don’t recall being told about the long term impact of the field on my own mental health.  Hearing story after story, hearing the real deep pain, seeing the ways systems oppressive others and cause harm has an impact on us as social workers.  We need to be told about this very real possibility in the beginning to make the best choices for ourselves.  While many of us have been told to engage in self-care while working in the field, my experience tells me mental health is more than just self-care practices.  Self-care is an important aspect of the way we show up in the field and treating our own mental health needs to be something held up as a standard for our work.  

Being vigilant about our own mental health and engaging in self care should be a part of a continuum of care.  Our mental health treatment and care does not need to be the same thing as self-care. There are many ways that we need to care for ourselves and each way is very individual based on our specific needs, abilities, talents, cultural connections and ways of being in the world. 

This is not an exhaustive conversation about mental health being a social worker but this blog post can be seen as a starting point to look inward to check in with ourselves about how we can taking our own mental health needs seriously.  It can also help us talk about it with our own coworkers, staff we supervise or those we mentor.

What is next in the series?

The next part of this series will look at how we handle stigma around talking about suicidal ideation.  As social workers we are human and struggle with our own feelings and experiences of suicide.  This can mean our own family histories of suicide, the trauma from suicide, the general cultural beliefs, our religious beliefs of suicide and even our own internal beliefs and experiences of suicide.  It is tricky, complicated and the line between personal and professional blurs.  It is important that we are clear about what we believe so we can be present with ourselves, with our clients and lessen the impact and trauma that having suicidal ideation can have on a person, their family and the larger system.